Original Air Date: 2/18/80
Written by: Alan Alda and James Rubinfier
Directed by: Alan Alda
The 4077th is hit by the biggest batch of wounded they've ever seen, driving everyone in camp to the point of complete exhaustion.
No one has time to sleep any more than an hour or two at a time, and we get to see some of the bizarre, sad, and even nightmarish dreams they have.
Margaret dreams of herself on her wedding night, in a passionate embrace with her groom. But then a line of soldiers march by, and her husband leaves her, marching off. Her bed is then filled with bloody, wounded soldiers, reaching out to her for help. We last see her standing in a field, her wedding dress stained with blood, as she stands there looking stunned.
B.J, catching a nap during a break from surgery, dreams of his wife Peg (Catherine Bergstrom). They are dancing at a fancy party, and stroll their way into the OR. Col. Potter interrupts them, asking B.J. to perform an operation. He does, ignoring Peg. She stands there for a moment or two, and then walks off.
Potter falls asleep in his office, and his dreams starts with a horse wandering in. Potter, now dressed in his WWI uniform, climbs aboard, playing polo with a live grenade. As the grenade explodes into fireworks, Potter then stumbles across his boyhood home, and sees himself riding a horse, hearing the sound of his mother calling him to dinner.
Winchester dreams of himself as a magician, performing tricks and entertaining the other members of the camp. A patient is wheeled out, and Winchester tries greater and greater tricks. But the patient gets worse, leading Winchester to try more and more, to no avail. He's finally left tap dancing and twirling sparklers. He wakes up from this, sweating profusely, muttering, "Damn."
The recovering patients are piling up so much that all the beds in Post Op are turned into bunk beds, and Father Mulcahy takes a moment to hear one patient's confession.
But he's so exhausted he falls asleep, the patient's confession turning into gibberish. Mulcahy dreams of himself dressed in flowing, glowing robes, and he is welcome to his pulpit like the Pope. He begins to speak to his flock, when suddenly drops of blood splatter his Bible. He looks up, and what was a statue of Jesus is now a bleeding soldier, and the pews full of parishoners is now an OR.
Klinger dreams of himself back in Toledo, where he wanders windy, desolate, empty streets. He stops at Tony Paco's, where inside is an OR. There he sees Potter, calling him inside. On Potter's operating table is...Klinger himself. Klinger is happy to be awakened from this dream by Kellye, who tells him Potter wants him to patch through a call.
Potter gets a wounded general to make a call to a nebbishy private, who refuses to send ambulances to pick up the wounded. After being threatened, the private relents, meaning the 4077th will finally be getting some relief.
With the crisis over, everyone meets up in the Mess Tent. Hawkeye is so exhausted he falls asleep at the table, and he dreams he's back in med school. He has fallen asleep, and his professor takes it out on him by removing Hawkeye's arm (in this instance, a mannequin arm) and tossing it into a river.
When the professor asks Hawkeye what the procedure is to reattach a limb, he can't answer, apologizing for being asleep. The professor responds by removing Hawkeye's other arm, also tossing it into a river. Hawkeye then finds himself, armless, in a boat filled with severed limbs.
He spots a bleeding little girl, and is helpless. He then finds himself in front of an operating table, where a nurse hands him a scalpel. Helpless, he screams into the heavens, waking himself up. Now awake, he sees there are more wounded arriving, and he heads out of the tent.
Later, everyone is back in the Mess Tent. They all plan to go back to their tents and sleep, but when Winchester absent-mindedly quotes, "Ah, sleep...perchance to dream", everyone sits back down for another cup of coffee.
Fun Facts: This is a great, format-busting episode: an idea that could've easily fallen flat on its face but doesn't.
That said, I've always felt this episode was a bit of a lost opportunity: since this episode consists of dream sequences, wouldn't it have been amazing to see Wayne Rogers, McLean Stevenson, or Larry Linville return to the show, just this one time? In particular, I could picture Margaret's dream involving Frank in some way.
This is the first time we got to see Peg. She has no dialogue in this episode, but she will when she returns for another episode.
I thought it was interesting that, out of all of them, only Potter's dream is not nightmarish or scary.
In Suzy Kalter's The Complete Book of M*A*S*H (1984), her write-up of this episode features this still:
Over 251 episodes, there must have been at least a few choice "deleted scenes"--too bad they were not included on any of the M*A*S*H DVDs.
Favorite Line: The young soldier confessing to Mulcahy has to speak gibberish to show how Mulcahy isn't really hearing him, and its all nonsensical stuff, except for one part where he says: "But fringes are gerbel, you know?"
